Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowens Shorter Fiction: Dead Reckoning focuses on Elizabeth Bowen's representations of violence against the self and others.Heather Levy examines the complicity of landscape and the implications of mayhem, murder, and suicide inThe Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (2006) edited by Angus Wilson andThe Bazaar and Other Stories (2008) edited by Alan Hepburn. It introduces five previously unpublished short story fragments and two nearly complete stories from The Elizabeth Bowen Collection at The Harry Ransom Research Center. Levy argues that Bowen's shorter fiction is a quixotic celebration of moral transgression, crime without punishment, and suicide without mourners. Bowen's compassionate response to offenders and violence anticipated the Perpetrator Trauma movement in the United States. Her innovations with the freedom of the short story produced an uncanny narration of violence. This book integrates the entirety of the scholarship on Bowen's short stories in a clear and original manner and offers a synthetic and compelling excavation of Bowen's unpublished short stories.

Heather Levyis professor of English literature at Western Connecticut State University.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Curating Violence and Perpetrator Trauma

Chapter 1 Ameliorative Suicide

Chapter 2 Redemptive Murder

Chapter 3 Inconclusive Mayhem

Conclusion: Implicating Readers

Appendix: Harry Ransom Selections

Bibliography